


Broken...Together

by MysticallyGallavich



Series: Prompts for my lovelies [5]
Category: Shameless (US)
Genre: Domestic Gallavich, Gallavich, Ian worries, M/M, Mickey spirals, eatingdisorder, goodending, prompt, selfharm, selfhate, take care of eachother, they come together
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-28
Updated: 2017-11-28
Packaged: 2019-02-07 23:14:48
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,699
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12851586
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MysticallyGallavich/pseuds/MysticallyGallavich
Summary: Prompt: TW eating disorder and self harm: I love reading your prompt fills! they're always so good :) I'm finally getting up the guts to ask for one I've been thinking about. What if Mickey has struggled with anorexia/self harm due to the many traumas he has been through, and Ian has to support him while recovers? I am five months into recovery for anorexia and it would be nice to have something to relate to :) :)





	Broken...Together

**Author's Note:**

> OK so this took so long. Not only beacuse of my lack of writing but because it was so hard for me to put myself there. for the asker, i am hoping this is what you wanted. First let me say, i dont know what you went through to any extent, so i hope this is what you needed. 
> 
> However, those feelings, that i speak about in there, of looking at yourself and thinking things about yourself are completly real to me. absolutley so. I don't have a eating disorder. huge lover of food, but as a girl who has never been small by any means there were times i struggled with the thoughts and feelings of this nature. as i said hope i did it justice. 
> 
> MUCH LOVE>

 

It started out simple enough. It wasn’t a big deal. Sure a million people say it but you can’t know how true it is until you feel it. Mickey started to notice as he aged, he had put on in his opinion quite a bit of weight. It didn’t matter that Ian didn’t seem to notice, or rather still even maybe more so than ever loved holding on to every inch of Mickey’s body. That didn’t matter because It wasn’t what Mickey saw when he looked at himself. Sure Ian liked it now, but what if it got worse and worse. He didn’t feel attractive, he just didn’t. Especially when he held his own standard to his boyfriends chiseled abs, and oh so sexy body.  So he thought to himself, what do you do when you want to change your body, you get healthy.

It was a slow progression at first. He stopped with the candy, as sad as it made him, and any desserts. Sometimes he would play around on his phone, looking at options.  So he figured, he would just eat healthier, that would make him feel better. But it didn’t. he still looked in the mirror and hated what he saw. He got a gym membership. He told Ian it was so they could work out together, he knew how much his boyfriend liked to work out, so it was believable. What his boyfriend didn’t know is he didn’t only work out on the weekends when Ian went with him. he worked out everyday, several times today. He would stop by the gym before work, after work, He started going hard at it. Then he started counting calories. These things in themselves weren’t bad things, and he didn’t have any problem. He kept saying it in his head. Maybe he should have spoken to Ian about how he felt, but that wasn’t clear then. He just needed to feel better about himself, feel like he deserved Ian, feel worthy. Some shit like that.

Then came the skipping meals. It was here and there, then it was more and more. Until he was only eating when he couldn’t find enough excuses not to. Like on his days off when Ian knew he hadn’t grabbed a bite at work, or he couldn’t fake just not feeling well. And even then he ate barely at all, He found ways to make it unnoticeable. But the weight loss wasn’t enough for him. Even though his boyfriend was getting extremely worried, which killed him, he was sad that It had come to the point where Ian was always asking what was going on, saying he was getting skinny. Too skinny?  It got worse, the self-hate, the self-judgment. He thought it was bad when he was denying that he liked dick, but this, this was way worse.

And Ian, Ian started noticing entirely too late for his own liking. He noticed Mickey losing weight he thought, ok we are working out, we’ve been eating better its okay, but started happening rapidly. And then Mickey no longer seemed to have much of an appetite for anything, he didn’t look to be sleeping, he rarely if ever slept without a shirt on anymore, and when they made love, mickey wanted to be faced away from him, he didn’t understand it. He thought he had done something wrong, like maybe Mickey didn’t want to look at him during sex anymore. But then he noticed when he ran his hands too close to Mickeys front side he shuttered away, and that brought him to now. He was standing behind Mickey in front of the mirror In tears. He knew it wasn’t the best reaction, he needed to stay calm, but what happened this morning, had destroyed him. He was possibly the worst boyfriend in the entire world right now. He had kissed Mickey and then he went to pull his shirt up and suddenly Mickey freaked out, trying to back away from him. He should have tried to do something to calm him, he should have but he didn’t he yanked his shirt up and there were tiny scars on different places. He wasn’t just rapidly losing weight, he was…what had happened? He didn’t want to think it, let alone say it but Mickey shaking and trying to excuse it as accidents. He knew better, if he had an accident he would have just told Ian and they would have moved on but this wasn’t it.  So he had waited till Mickey went into the shower a little after that, and looked through his phone.

Yes, he knew he was invading his privacy but what he found, exercise apps, calorie counting apps, searches among searches. They were everywhere. And he burst into tears, when Mickey got out of the shower, he was a mess he was begging his boyfriend to talk to him but Mickey wouldn’t, or couldn’t, he wasn’t really sure. He just ran out of the house and Ian freaked out and ran after him, it took him two hours to find him. Where did he find him? at the gym. Barely breathing, just almost ready to collapse. So Ian turned the machine off and grabbed his boyfriend into his arms and begged him to talk to him.

Mickey continued on for days swearing nothing was wrong, nothing at all, as hard and as much as Ian tried he couldn’t get inside Mickey’s brain, until one day, Mickey looked up at Ian as Ian was taking his medication and he tilted his head.

“what was it like?” Mickey asked softly.

“What was what like?”

“The bi-polar…How did it feel inside…” He had never asked that, always too afraid to know the answer, but Mickey knew, even if he hadn’t admitted it to Ian, this had been going on so long, and he knew something about him was broken. He didn’t know what. He didn’t see a problem in being healthy, to being better, but the way Ian had been acting. It made him wonder, make him wonder if how he was feeling right now, the need to run away, the need to nobody to think something was wrong with him when it wasn’t…is that how Ian had felt? Ian had always sworn nothing was wrong with him…How had Ian felt?

“Like I was losing control of anything, I would have done anything to hold on to my control, in a world I no longer understood. Is that how you feel?” Ian asked.

“What? No…Was just curious how you felt.” He had stated but Ian knew better, he was asking because he needed to understand what was going on inside of him, Ian didn’t understand it either but Ian knew that was normal, how can you understand suddenly when everything in your world changes, becomes uncontrollable. Ian hated that he hadn’t seen it before.

“Show me your body,” Ian asked one day and Mickey glared at him. “Mickey…I want to help you…show me what you’ve done. If you haven’t done anything…if it's all normal…just show me…”Ian was trying but he didn’t know what he was doing or if would make it worse. Mickey finally did, and he saw it all. How thin mickey had really gotten, the tiny scars of someone who hated themselves that much. It killed him but this time he didn’t break down, he didn’t. he pulled Mickey into his arms and spoke.

“Mickey, I love you, every piece of you. If you keep on like this, if you do, you wont make it and we cant take that okay? I got better…I mean I'm not better and its not the same. What I have is all about my imbalances. And a bunch of other bullshit I don’t understand. And I know not shit about what you are going through right now. But you were and are beautiful. In fact the most beautiful man I have ever seen in my entire life. And I just want you to take care of yourself. Please baby…please…I just want you to get help, like you wanted me too.” Ian was hoping he wasn’t diminishing what mickey was going through by comparing it to his own problems. They were in no way the same, he knew that. But the feeling of helplessness he still had, he knew at least that part of it, mickey had, and he needed to break through to him.

It turns out that he did a bit. He chipped away bit by bit, just like he had their love. It wasn’t long after that Mickey broke, it took some doing, but Ian was literally begging him to eat one day, and he finally looked up and took a bite, it made him sick, and he didn’t want it but he did it. It was only two days after that that he admitted he had a problem. Not any fucked up disorder, he refused to see that, but he did admit to Ian that some things had been happening, and he didn’t know how to solve them. He said he wanted to be healthy, but it wasn’t enough, because he needed to be better. He had to be and he broke down crying into Ian’s arms. It broke Ian but he didn’t let it show. He asked Mickey to go to his therapist with him, which of course Mickey refused, he wasn’t a bitch, he wasn’t going to do that. But Ian said not just for him, “Maybe she can make me understand…in a way I’m not able to. Can you help her to help me understand what you’re  going through.. Then I can help you on my own. And we can do this together. Always together.

Mickey thought about it for days, and he looked in the mirror, over those scars, it wasn’t until Ian caught him in the middle of the night with a blade in his hand, bleeding from his side, that they cried together, and Mickey knew he had to get help. It was one thing to hide it from Ian, but to see the look on Ian's face while it was happening while he broke. From all of the psychological scars of his past to the very real life ones sitting on his skin. He had to do what he would want Ian to do. So he went.

He talked to the therapist, who talked to him alone and with Ian. Because he didn't want to do this without Ian, he told her he would walk out If Ian couldn’t be there. After all he only wanted to get better for Ian. She had explained to him, he had to get better for him, Ian could help but it would never work if it wasn’t for him. Much like his diet had started as something to look better for Ian, to do better for Ian, doing things that he thought made his lover happy were not the answer. And she spoke, “as much as you want Ian better for Himself and not just you, that’s what he wants to.”

So he thought about that and listened to what she had to say. He and Ian had talked about support group options and rehab options. They started slow. Ian had gotten him into a rehab but Mickey was nervous about it. He didn’t go at first. He thought he could do it on his own, and he tried, really he did but it wasn’t long until he was sneaking things past Ian, and it wasn’t long after that he couldn’t fight it anymore, he had to get help. Real help. So he did. He did the damn rehab, and the meetings and all of that bullshit. But nothing helped like Ian did. It was kind oof weird to think about it. Ian just loved him so much and he knew that and he loved Ian and he kept thinking back to everything they had done together, including when he laid beside a still Ian for days at a time.  They slowly got into a routine, and he cancelled his gym membership. They decided they would only work out together and not for a while, not until Mickey could eat without hating it so much. Afterall there had been a time when mickey loved nothing more than food. And he knew that it would never be the same, it had been explained to him many more times than he cared to count on, but he did it.

Step by step, day by day, Mickey would eat. Ian making just a little more at a time. Mickey never would want to eat like he once had, but they were managing slowly. Once a week they would sit on the floor, and they would just talk. They would talk about how they were feeling. It helped Mickey if Ian let him ask him about the darkest parts of him first. So Ian would listen to questions about his past and answer them, where if anybody else asked he would tell them to go fuck themselves and in turn, Mickey would answer in the same way. When Ian asked how much he ate that day, Mickey would honestly tell him, and he would tell him how gross he thought it was somedays, and how gross he felt sometimes, he would answer the questions the best as he could and as typical with mickey there were plenty of times he tried to deflect. Sometimes he thought if he got ian talking about anything else, he could get him to forget.

Mickey even picked a dozen fights with Ian to get off the topic of the things that he didn’t want to talk about but Ian felt so much over this all because he felt like he had let it happen, that he never let  Mickey stray him from the topic for too long. He did allow it a little because h knew that’s what Mickey needed but he kept on trying. And day by day Mickey was getting better. He still didn’t want to eat the damn food but he did. He would fight it for years to come, and somedays he wanted to eat and some days he didn’t, but Ian would sit by his side, and beg him for just one more bite. On the days when he could tell Mickey was feeling particularly low, he wouldn’t even give him the whole plate. He would make his own plate twice as large, and he would only put one bite down at a time. Mickey yelled at him sometimes for it, but it honestly did help. To not look down and see this huge meal that he couldn’t possibly eat, instead he saw this tiny bite, and on those days, it might have taken him a long while to finish his food, and he didn’t know how much of it there was , but somehow Ian had, and he would tell him when he was done.

If anyone else had treated him the way Ian had he probably would punch them in the face, but he often considered what Ian let him make him do. Like take his own medication and eat when he didn’t want to. A fact he was reminded of during one of Ian's low periods. And he thought, If it worked for him, so he turned the tables on Ian, and talked about his own shit to get Ian to own up to his shit. And when it worked, he thought a little better of the things he had been made to do at the hands of his boyfriend, who sometimes felt like a nurse, but on the good days. On the good days, he remembered, how lucky they were to have each other, two people who took care of each other, and he didn’t mind the nagging so much on those days, because it is what he wanted right?

To take care of each other until the end of time. It is what they both had wanted and it is what they both had got. 

**Author's Note:**

> What??? I did three tonight. Man...that means i dont have to write tomorrow right? lmaooo. oooh but i will after job hunting, this girl needs some moola 
> 
> Much love to you all.


End file.
